I’d kind of be willing to wager that we actually hated nazis mostly because they were foreign, more than anything else. I think all that ww2 valorizing history schlock about me and the good old boys from ken-tucky and all over going out and killing all the nazis has totally cooked america’s understanding of that war. I dunno, towards the end we did nuke a country, twice, in a totally superfluous and cruel act, and we also concentrated the domestic immigrant population that we were bombing during that war into camps. Everyone brushes over that part, though, and america is truly faultless. These aren’t our true characters, being revealed, no, this is just some errant deviation from a much more civilized and reasonable norm! Surely, that must be the case.

Yeah, the people who see this as a significant deviation from the norm aren’t exactly incorrect, but I wonder to what degree they really understand the total history and scope of america as it has existed for basically all of it’s span. What we’ve done, in this country.

Who comes out ahead after all of this? Who benefits in the long run? I’m having a hard time finding any winners.

Nobody ever really wins here. In either the short term, or the long term, with or without violence. If the clap back of oct 7th hadn’t happened, then the state of affairs would’ve remained exactly as horrible as they’ve always been, and probably would’ve slowly decomposed even further, and the population probably would’ve just died slower deaths over the course of several years. Certainly in retrospect, that maybe seems better than the alternative, but nobody knows the future, really. It could be just as likely the oct 7th was exactly the kind of pressure that started a chain of events that ultimately leads to the deconstruction of the state of israel. It’s completely impossible to know the future, completely, anything else is kind of just armchair speculation.

We have to place oct 7th into context, and to place it into context, we have to have a chain of causality. That eliminates the sort of responsibility that people like to attribute to everything. It doesn’t eliminate tactics, or the decision making process, it actually enhances it, if anything, but we do have to look at, say, how the state of affairs in gaza lead to such an attack. Both in how such a sorry state led to such an attack, obviously, and also in how Hamas was funded as their government in part by israel in order to ensure a more violent opposing force that would be more willing to mutually escalate with them, especially when that force is locked in to a specific location and can only really fight on israel’s terms, unlike most of israel’s other actors, which can fight more on the terms of the international political stage. Obviously still a deck which is heavily stacked against them, but slightly less so.

What I mean by all of this is that israel manufactured the conditions to enact their genocide, and that escalation would’ve happened either way because they’re not able to be bargained with. Under that framework, any tactic the gazans, specifically, could’ve taken, was pretty much doomed to failure from the start. Or rather, was doomed to not really have a positive outcome in the immediate short term, for them specifically. I’m not saying oct 7th was really a wise decision, right, I’m just saying that we don’t really know. Maybe attribute to me analysis paralysis, then, I’m not quite sure, ironically, but I think it’s easier to have a hindsight-accurate armchair QB backseat approach to this than to make those decisions of what to do in the moment.

I think a lot of people would cut contact with their family at times like this due to the ways in which these kinds of beliefs often intersect with massive amounts of interpersonal abuse and broadly dysfunctional and unhappy relationships. I think this is most especially true of people who are queer, neurodivergent, disabled, or a member of some other minority, who are easily going to be subject by that abuse from their family more and more, especially as they may be more dependent on them and as they’re more noticeably going to see that abuse well up as a result of those narratives. You know, people who get to see the “ugly sides” of their family.

I would say that if you’re not actively dependent on your family, and you’re not part of an actively hated minority which they will more easily discard, disrespect, and abuse, then that makes it easier to cut them out of your life, but that’s also definitely a time at which you will counterintuitively be in the best position to sway them, since you’re at your most secure.

So I would say that this is, in some part, a decision which you should probably make in reflection of your current material circumstances, the current state of your life. This also isn’t a decision which you need to make right now, really, to cut him out of your life or decide to blow this particular one up. You said he’s already married, and that your other two brothers aren’t going, so one more probably won’t hurt things that much even if you invent an excuse.

I’m like 90% sure if I showed my dad the picture of elon musk hitting the five knuckle shuffle live on stage in 4k 60fps three times in a row, he’d probably flee to the “my heart goes out to you” comment, right before trying to find some sort of talking point he could throw down the hopper in order to justify this shit, which is really to say nothing of the fact that he basically just fundamentally agrees with elon’s actions on basically every level if he was to actually sit down and think about it for long enough. There’s some people which cannot be helped, because they will repeatedly choose not to be. There isn’t exactly a correct answer, here, I think the major thing is that if it goes sideways because of your decisions, you shouldn’t beat yourself up or crash out over it, or become overly callous.

This is probably why the tech industry has been hardened against that sort of thing, and is, say, famously hard to unionize.

And… a great example of that is Palestine. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call what Hamas did “attacking a target”. What was the outcome of that? Israel had “justification” to engage in mass ethnic cleansing for over a year.

You put justification in quotes here, and I think you clearly understand why. Netenyanhu propped up hamas as the de facto government specifically in order to ensure a more militant party would give israel the necessary “justification” to attack the people there. So, even their governance, and that attack itself, is traceable to israel’s state violence. A minor note, but an important one, I think. And I think one which requires more thought than just like, pointing to that and then saying “See, I told you, violence doesn’t work, and is bad, and israel wants it!”, because israel’s obviously not an overly rational state which is actually functional, either for it’s people or for it’s goals.

More broadly though, it’s not necessary at all for people to have guns, in order for cops to kill them. Cops can invent any number of reasons to kill someone in their day to day. The gun is something you just see in the news media a lot because it’s incredibly common in america, and especially common in the hoods where cops go out and kill people in larger numbers. Again, we can see that as an extension of a context, created by the state, which has naturally created violence. Partially through the valuable, and illegal, property, mostly in the form of drugs, which must be protected through extralegal means, i.e. cartels and gangs, but also just naturally as a result of police violence in those places as an extension of that, which is an intentional decision to create by the ruling class. It’s a way to create CIA black budgets, it’s a way to incarcerate and vilify your political opponents at higher rates, etc. You can’t be intolerant to the idea of guns as a blanket case, in that context, because it’s a totally different kind of context, and is one which is created by the state.

I would maybe also make the point that a protest is incentive enough against killing people, because it would be widely known and televised as a massacre in the media. You know, just gunning people down in the street, en masse. That line is sort of, becoming less clear over time, as the government seems to be more and more willing to condone that, if not outright do that, but I don’t really think that if, say, everyone in the BLM riots was armed, the cops would just start randomly firing into the crowd. They’d be hopelessly outnumbered, for one, so that’s a pretty clear reason for the police not to just start sputtering off rounds like a bunch of idiots, but you’d also probably see a protracted national guard response over the course of the next several weeks, which nobody really wants to deal with, both in terms of the media response and just the basic type of shit that would happen.

You also have several extrapolations you can make from just that happening in the first place, even though it never would. Like, the kind of city which could get up to that, in america, would maybe reveal something incredibly uncomfortable to the ruling institutions about that particular city and its political disposition and potentially that could be extrapolated to the entire country. Most places don’t get to that point because they reach civil war before that, which is kind of more along the lines of what the preceding commenter is talking about. More along the lines of, say, IRA tactics.

Which is all to say, that this is something which is shaped entirely by the government’s intentional responses and the contexts that they create. When they decide to escalate, that should be seen, naturally, as being on them, and not on your average person. I think what the previous commenter is trying to say, with a good faith reading, is that we are probably due, in the next 4 years and perhaps beyond, for an escalation. I don’t think that’s really a morally great thing, or a good context, but I do think they’re potentially right based on how things shake out, and I think that people should probably come to terms with that even as we try to avoid it.

Edit: Also I forgot to note this, but this isn’t really a disagreement in core ideals, but just of tactics. Dual power isn’t so much a deliberate choice of tactic so much as it should just be a certainty, being that both sides of this debate are mutually beneficial to one another. If you have, or can place, a more reasonable politician in office, either through violence (highly unusual, but does happen occasionally if the dice reroll lands well enough), or through the political system itself, then that reasonable politician is just that, more reasonable. i.e. more likely to accomplish goals which are desirable to any violent guerillas. Likewise, the pressure that violent guerillas exert can be seen as a kind of abstract economic cost constantly being leveraged against unreasonable political powers, in favor of reasonable elements of that political system.

The main point against this, is that the united states is currently so unreasonable, politically, that it’s functionally impossible to bargain with in really any way. Any violence, under such a political system, one which refuses any attempt at change, is seen as kind of ultimately meaningless. But I think that’s maybe also part of a broader point about how people just generally feel, understandably, incredibly pessimistic about the future, and are sort of retreating back into a kind of survival mode. Especially, I think, because they’ve been made to feel totally responsible for the weight of the world, when ultimately the decision of the political power to retaliate and do mass violence is, as previously stated, both inevitable, and entirely their own decision, that they must be held responsible for, rather than the people.

Depends on context, which I think is missed in basically all these discussions. Solar, wind, and hydropower are obviously contextually dependent technologies, that are well suited to particular environments. They have to line up with energy demand curves, or else impose expensive and inefficient battery solutions. They don’t have a whole lot of efficiency in terms of land use, which there are some proposed solutions for, but they’re pretty efficient both economically, and are pretty ecologically contentious as long as recycling is being done adequately. Nuclear solves a different problem. It provides base load, which is somewhat important, it’s potentially not as flexible as a technology, but it’s easier to build infrastructure for because it’s more consistent. It can also be somewhat land-use agnostic, though things like water use for cooling towers and tradeoffs such as that are definitely a consideration. It’s also much denser in terms of land use, meaning it’s potentially more efficient for larger cities.

They’re both just different technologies, with different applications, and they both have a place in any sensible structuring of the world. I don’t understand why people become so split along the obvious astroturfed and petrol-funded propaganda that floats around for both sides. You have pro-nuclear people that are saying solar panels like, require exotic materials mines, which is insanely ironic, and you have solar people who are fearmongering about solved problems like nuclear waste and safety concerns and efficiency in terms of economic cost, which is also insanely ironic. The fact that this conflict comes up every time strikes me as kind of horrendously stupid and obviously favorable to petrol lobbies.

I say all that in my comment, but, it’s not just that this guy is a techbro, there are some other factors that make it so he’s probably the guy. With those, I just think that it’s probably more likely that this is the guy, than that it isn’t. I don’t really see a need to theorize that this isn’t the guy based on how the guy in the video is some sort of crazy criminal mastermind, when he also hits up a starbucks right before, as well as a bunch of other evidence in the video itself that this is probably a somewhat average, if maybe uncommon, guy. i.e. it easily could just be a techbro.

From what the news has told us, which is really all we have, this guy fits the bill pretty solidly. We’ll see with the dna, ballistics, and fingerprint, but we also know that’s historically not really conclusive evidence either. The best you could do is that this guy fits the specific timeline, which we’ve heard less about relative to everything else, though from what we have heard, he does seem to fit pretty well. This entire issue, the issue of being able to conclusively tell who’s done a crime at what time, that’s part of why the justice system needs reform, because it’s very likely that you could just get this all wrong. I can acknowledge that reality, and also acknowledge that, based on what is publicly available so far, this guy is probably the guy.

I dunno, the idea that this random guy, who’s reading and posting shit about the unabomber’s manifesto on his goodreads, and happened to be passing through new york via hostel and then greyhound at this time, is just some random guy, I dunno. With modern social media, I think we really start to strain credibility that this isn’t the guy. You would have to have a very convenient fall guy for that to be the case. It probably would’ve been easier to just catch any random schizo techbro inside of new york and then throw a gun and prewritten manifesto at that guy, to be honest, if the nypd or fbi just wanted some random dude to bag and throw away to pretend like they’re capable. Like you said, you could find them by the thousands.

The crazy part about jury nullification is that if I was someone who was wanting to engage in it I probably wouldn’t be posting my opinions about the case online in a public fashion because that could easily be used as something to dismiss me from the case. That’s like a step away from bringing it up to the judge in the courtroom. They’re probably already gonna select a bunch of random boomers who have no idea what’s going on to comprise the jury anyways, since they can just do that if they want to, in the same way that the jury can just decide someone’s guilty or not. So that whole conversation is kind of moot.

Yeah, it’s been really crazy. People have been trueanoning on this one just like people did with the trump shooting, even though that one was obviously also a pretty clear cut case. I think partially, it’s because people are wanting to be half-funny, and are basically just iterating on the joke of “oh, I saw him at bible study at the time! that couldn’t have been him!” and then sharing photo edits, right.

I think part of it is that everyone has been trained by true crime and fiction to think of all of these events as though they’re living in a tom clancy book, or something. They’re enraptured by the spectacularization of this event, and of all of the past of history, enraptured by the transformation of this event into a spectacle, so they get the feeling that, oh, oooh, something’s off, but I just can’t tell what. It always has to be some sort of increasingly more dramatic escalation, until there’s some sort of release of tension, because that’s how things work in fiction. In fiction, a guy isn’t allowed to just pull off a hit on a random unprotected CEO, ride his bike to central park, leave a backpack full of monopoly cash because he’s kind of cracked, get on a bus, and then go to a shithole in pennsylvania and then get busted over a mcdonald’s hash brown. That shit doesn’t happen in fiction, so it’s not allowed to happen in real life.

I think part of it is also some sort of idiot idea about, somehow, if they just question the narrative on this enough, it will cause the guy to be innocent, somehow just them being conspiratorial on social media will cause that if they cook on it hard enough.

Most of all, though, I think it’s sort of this desire to have the guy who shot that CEO get away, or be a different guy because, in the mind of your average person, that guy is some agent 47 super CEO hitman, that’s going to liberate us brokies from our shitty healthcare problems, when obviously that’s kind of a delusional escapist fantasy.

Basically, none of this is allowed to be actually real. This isn’t a real event, in the mind of your average person. This is a media event, it’s being treated like one. Much like that, you can cook up fanfictions, but it doesn’t change the base media product, and you have to know that you can’t do anything to affect the thing itself, it’s set in stone and it’s unchangeable and it’s totally ethereal and out of your grasp.

That’s sort of partially why I think this isn’t going to change anything, and, though I think maybe a repeat might happen, I’m not holding my breath. Because while everyone can recognize the problem, everyone, in classic american style, wants some superman to come and save them, and is willing to do nothing, or put anything on the line, in order to really save themselves or others.

I really find it to be quite absurd that people are still thinking this isn’t the guy. This is probably the guy. My basis for that is basically just that the shooter had a 200 dollar peak design redditor backpack and a uniqlo packable jacket when he shot that guy, and those are both heavily techbro-coded fashion items. That’s on top of all the internet history of this specific guy pretty much indicating that he’s the guy. Back problems, leading to a several month long disappearance, after he turns 26, and is no longer on his parent’s healthcare plan.

We can also look at it through the lens of just the assassination attempt itself. The news is saying they found either a 3d printed gun, or more commonly, a ghost gun (which I have not been able to find a consistent account of). In either case, that involves buying a mostly unregulated firearm upper, and then either finishing an “80%” pre-assembled lower with a drill press, or probably even a regular cordless drill, or just wholesale printing the entire lower of the gun yourself. Both of those, are also techbro-coded methods of obtaining a firearm. Compared to just buying a somewhat common firearm in a state where it’s pretty easy to get a gun a couple months before, and then shaving the serial numbers off the gun, or just getting a gun off the black market, or stealing one from someone, which all seem maybe easier than going the ghost gun route.

In the video itself, we see him struggle to cycle the gun manually, due what is probably a combination of using subsonic ammunition, and his suppressor, which I’m assuming did not have a nielsen device, or, a booster. Those are devices that are meant to help browning-style tilting barrel designs cycle much more reliably. They also tend to cycle less reliably with heavier baffled suppressors compared to much lighter, quieter, disposable, and easier to produce wipe-based suppressors.

His research and meticulously planned operation also consisted of shooting this guy in the back, in front of a camera, while this guy walked to his hotel. That’s a plan that has a high percentage chance of success, it’s the same way that you’d see many mob hits happen, but does it strike me as something which is particularly complicated or out of character for this guy, if he had a couple months to cook something up?

Based on the entire description of that chain of events, that would probably indicate that this is a somebody that’s had some amount of preparation but wasn’t some kind of professional or overwhelming genius. It could be the case that they dug around online for thirty minutes, happened to find a guy that had both disappeared for a couple months, had medical problems, was a little bit more conspiratorial, or rather, had incoherent politics, and would be the kind of guy who would dress in a peak design backpack and in a uniqlo jacket, and was ALSO a guy which was exiting new york at that time via bus. They would then have to plant evidence on him, which cops are known to do, but that’s all, legitimately, entirely possible. Is it more likely than this being the guy, based on everything we’ve seen from the video?

I would say no, probably not, this is probably the guy.

I mean, this shit should probably just be banned as spam, right? I don’t think it would be acceptable to make posts that are majority bot content under really any other circumstance, and I don’t see why this is really any different. In fact, it would’ve been more effective, and more helpful, to go to, say, google maps, and then just link to where the photo was taken, or maybe go to the wikipedia page for that particular building, or this lakefront, or what have you. That’s on top of how we already have contributors who are able to actually say what this is on firsthand knowledge, rendering this redundant on top of potentially being totally inaccurate.

Because for the majority of the world, the average American is a selfish bourgeois with a big house and two cars, who thinks oppression is when the gas price rise.

I mean I fucking live here and that’s pretty much my assessment as well to be honest. Maybe not your average american if we’re working on like, who’s right just based on home ownership statistics, but certainly, that’s not really an invalid perception.

I think it’s kind of stupid that we’re defaulting to the idea that a billion dollars as sort of the default “well, that’s too much money, nobody could ever possibly deserve THAT much money!” metric we’re using. Not particularly because there are really any good billionaires, I mostly think that’s not really the case and agree that any claim to the contrary would probably strain credibility.

About the most you could point to is somebody like taylor swift, or any musical performer, or athlete, someone who specifically gains money based almost exclusively on their command of cultural capital and ability as a performer rather than necessarily on extracting the surplus labor value of others, though to a certain extent, you have to have some sort of corporate backing or management company to reach that level, and even if those performers don’t control it, there’s probably some level of loaded complicity going on there. These types would maybe be just above the sorts of people who just run good or more ethical companies, as far as companies can be, on the billionaire morality totem poll.

No, my criticism isn’t so much that billionaires aren’t necessarily evil, because I think it’s mostly true enough that billionaires are all evil for it to be as true a heuristic as a heuristic can be true. I think my ire draws less from that, and more from how this sort of like, meaningless agreement over this particular example doesn’t really necessarily lend itself towards any more in depth analysis. We’ve put the marker too high, the standard too high. A billion dollars is obviously very extreme, you can see that with the comparisons from a million to a billion. What about a million, though? Is that bad, is that a bad standard of evil, if you have a million dollars, does that make you evil? Where’s the cutoff, here? I’m sure plenty of people know someone with a million bucks, you could probably just point at anyone who owns a home in LA.

My point is that instead of some arbitrary cutoff we should probably just be looking at what’s actually going on here in terms of the relationships at work and the constructed hierarchies. If that’s the case then we can probably draw the line less at a billion dollars and more at anyone propping up this stupid bullshit type hierarchy, and specifically those more critical lynchpins which hold it together. Perhaps, like a “not necessarily a billionaire” healthcare CEO. Now that, that would be a good start.

that’s always been the case, even when they had that shit printed on the can. it’s a matter of the individual retailers doing that. I think there was some system to report them to the company but obviously the arizona tea company doesn’t really have any control over the prices that retailers decide to sell their shit for. which is partially why I think the whole thing that they’re only supposed to cost a dollar everywhere is kind of lowkey just a marketing ploy.

kind of racist

kind of?

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little removed? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.

Eastern propaganda

lol

I’m not defending the insurance industry or capitalism for-profit healthcare, but I worry more generally about society normalizing or celebrating violence.l and where that’s moght take us.

society already normalizes and celebrates violence plenty. it just doesn’t tend to normalize it or celebrate it against the people who actually deserve it, pretty much apparently until a couple days ago when everyone sort of collectively seems to have realized that they all agree.